Sacha Jafri's Time Out Dubai cover

Brit art sensation Sacha Jafri has designed a custom cover for our mag

By
Nyree Barrett
08 March 2011

British Artist Sacha Jafri designed the cover of Time Out Dubai magazine this week. Check out book stores, supermarkets and petrol stations across the city to get a copy. For just Dhs7 you can buy your own piece of art history.

Considered one of the UK’s freshest new artists, having exhibited alongside Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Razza and Banksy, to name but a very small few, Sacha Jafri is most certainly one of the best-known artists in Dubai, renowned for crafting works that instantly garner extreme value. His creations include a piece incorporating David Beckham’s footprint, as well as the official Ashes Victory Painting, created around the England team’s handprints and signatures. Yet Sacha’s biography doesn’t end anywhere near there: past achievements include sell-out shows in London, New York, Hong Kong, Miami, Berlin, Dubai, Singapore, Austria, Monaco, Cannes and Frankfurt, and he has single handedly raised more than Dhs32.9 million for charity in the past five years.

On top of all this, Sacha is closely linked to local organisation START, a non-profit organisation established by Art Dubai and the Al Madad Foundation that promotes the universal language of art to heal, educate and enrich the skills and opportunities of children in the poorest areas of the Middle East. ‘Earlier this year START invited me to meet their children in Jordan at the Barqa’a refugee camp,’ Sacha tells us. ‘Following that visit, I created a collection for Art Dubai 2011, which aims to draw upon the children’s lives, understand their unstable past, reflect the layering of their troubled present and find inspiration in their hope for a better future.’

Among these pieces, he selected one exclusively to adorn Time Out Dubai’s cover – the original of which will be on show at START’s large stand at Art Dubai. Wondering how much this piece will be sold for in aid of the charity? We’ll let you know after the fair. In the meantime, these exclusive images reveal the Jordan trip that helped inspire our cover.